Events, particularly these days, tend to outrun the best laid plans to anticipate research trends. And it might seem that this was true in the case of this conference, sponsored by UCSC's Santa Cruz Center for International Economics, the Journal of International Money and Finance, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The conference was planned last year, at a time when most academic researchers were aware and concerned about the incipient economic slowdown, and whether the major economies would "de-couple", and in turn how these factors would impact the constellation of global imbalances.

As it turns out, the papers were all, in my opinion, remarkably germane to issues we're concerned about right now: how the composition of debt determines vulnerability to crises, the effect of capital controls on capital flows, the role of the IMF, and the usefulness of macroeconometric models to predict exchange